Peter Wicked

by Broos Campbell

  “Martha,” said Browbury, his voice low with fury.

  She scowled but didn’t look at him.

  “Your father must think pretty high of you, to give you such a doll.”

  “He dinnit give it to me. I took it.” She looked pretty pleased with herself about that. “We had lots of them, but the pirate stole ’em all, along with the clothes.”

  “Clothes? You mean the dresses the dolls were wearing?”

  “Ay-yuh . . . nay. Nice silk clothes. Not clothes,” she corrected herself. “Cloths. Big bundles of it, and lots and lots and lots of dollies all wrapped up in paper.”

  “Martha!”

  “Well, we did so have them!” She stamped her foot. Then she gestured me closer so that I knelt down. Jerking a grubby thumb at her father, she confided in a stage whisper, “He tried to take Yvette away when he seen you coming. It were him I kicked, not the pirate.”

  I grinned. “You don’t say! Well, you know what? I’ve got heaps of chocolate on board, given to me by the Viceroy of Porto Rico himself. Would you like some?”

  Wide-eyed, she nodded, then took me by the hand and led me away from her father, who stood there twisting his hands together and looking at us a-lopsided. I knelt beside her.

  “I had chocolate once,” she said. “The pirate give it to me while he were taking the clothes away. I mean, cloths. And it were very nice, but you know what?”

  “What?”

  “It wants sugar.”

  “But don’t you got lots of sugar?”

  “Nay, hardly never. Just ’lasses sometimes, but they don’t hardly ever gimme any.”

  “But your father says you had a cargo of sugar.”

  “Him!” She beckoned me close again. “He tells fibs.”

  “Well,” said I, standing up, “I have sugar, too. Would you like some of that as well?”

  “Ay-yuh, if you please.”

  We shared a warm little smile as we walked hand in hand back to her father. He stood apart from his crew, or they stood apart from him; whichever it was, they were mighty uncomfortable associating with each other. That weren’t entirely unusual, as merchant captains are pretty tough with their crews as a rule. They don’t feed them enough and will put them on the beach with or without pay, if the mood strikes them and they can get away with it, but usually a ship’s company will stick with their skipper. It’s only natural to prefer the devil you know. But these men shrank away from him like he had the fever on him, which alarmed me till I looked again and saw that what might’ve been a flush was just dirt, and the rheum in his eyes was just from rum.

  Horne came up from the hold. “She’s in ballast, sir. Some ship’s stores, not much, and most of it rotten or wormy. It smells of spirits, but I didn’t see any. I found a few muskets and such, but no more than what he might need for defense.”

  “Or shooting pigs.” The Spaniards had left pigs and goats on islands all around the Main, as a way of supplying themselves with meat that kept itself fresh. “What kind of ballast?”

  “Local rock.”

  “Any sign of coffee or sugar?”

  He shook his head. “Would’ve smelled the coffee. Didn’t see no sugar, just black strap in hogsheads, and none too much of it.”

  “Captain Browbury, let’s have a look at your papers.”

  Browbury’s cabin was a close and nasty place where even the air felt moldy, but at least it was away from other ears. I sat in the single chair and looked through his books. They were scratched out and scribbled over, but a few minute’s study made the pattern clear.

  “You’ve been a naughty fellow, Captain Browbury.”

  “You’re a hard-hearted young sprout, ain’t ye?”

  “So I been told. But I ain’t concerned with what happened in the long ago, you may be glad to hear. It’s the recent past that interests me.”

  He squinted. “Like for instance?”

  “Like for instance you were running a load of silk out of Guadeloupe, weren’t you?”

  “Nay, mate, I dinnit never! Silk comes from China. Now I ask ye, do I look like I been in China?”

  “It went to France first, obviously—the dolls. Your end of the deal was to run it to where, Charleston? Baltimore? No, not Baltimore. Too many chances of getting boarded by a revenue cutter on the way up the Chesapeake. Course, with all them creeks in the Eastern Shore to hide in . . .”

  “I never in life been to Guadeloupe!”

  “All right then, Martinico. And you been carrying a powerful lot of brandy, too, by the smell of it.”

  “Ah, ye wrong me!”

  “The hell you say. Yvette is a fashion doll, out of Paris. The ladies use ’em to see what the latest mode is. Your daughter said you had lots of ’em and a cargo of silk cloth besides. But I guess it don’t matter now where you were bound. Fact is, tell you true, I don’t care one way or another.” I tapped the book in my lap. “But you’ll have to tell your owner something, and I got to tell the commodore something. I think you were in ballast already, looking to pick up a load of something somewhere, to be bought with a draft that was waiting for you at wherever it was you was bound for, and this so-called pirate couldn’t be bothered with you.”

  “Sugar and coffee, it was—the finest quality!”

  “Don’t insult me. I don’t see a manifest here, no bills of sale, nothing to prove you’re who you say you are. I could seize your brig and arrest you all.”

  His mouth made a little o. “Now, mate, ye wouldn’t. Think of the lass.”

  “You think of her. I’m too busy thinking of me.” He got a calculating look, and I guessed I was hitting the right notes. “The naval agent in Le Cap is a mate of mine. Nathan Levy—tight with a dollar, but he’s a man for business and we get along. He’d make sure this here brig was condemned in court, all above board and proper. She’d fetch about two thousand dollars after me and my boys cleaned her up, I bet. We’d keep half the proceeds, and half of that would be mine, free and clear. You and Martha on the beach, Mr. Browbury, and me with five hundred dollars in my pocket.” I pretended to calculate. “Base pay, with cash value of rations and various allowances . . . Say, that’s better than six months’ pay for me.”

  Now that my eyes had gotten used to the dimness, I could see piles of filthy clothing on the deck, and decayed remnants of dinners long past, and broken pieces of machinery that might’ve been pieces of pistols or lamps or tackle.

  “Not to mention whatever you got paid for your contraband,” I added. “We’ll confiscate any cash you got and lump it in with the profits, unless of course it happens to find its way into someone’s pocket between now and then.”

  “Well, you tell me what to do, then,” he said, pretty severe considering the bind he was in. “This rover I told ye about was real enough, an’ he were an American.”

  “I thought you said he spoke French.”

  “He did when he were aboard of us, aye, but it seems to me, now that I look back on it, that there were a good deal o’ play-actin’ about him. Always with big gestures and broad looks to convey his meanin’, and except for the handsome one, the others just grunted when they said anything a-tall. An’ speakin’ of his crew, I been wonderin’ what it was that struck me so strange about ’em, an’ watchin’ your boys, it finally come to me. They had navy discipline.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well . . . there weren’t no sir’s or salutes or none o’ that, but they knowed what they was about, and no bickerin’, and no question about who was in charge. And no molly-maukin’ around or any o’ that, like you get with your inferior quality of freebooter.”

  “Oh ho,” I said, thinking I smelled triumph. “So you know about pirating?”

  “And who don’t who spends any time in Charlotte Amalie?” He waved a dismissive hand. “The Danes don’t care what goes on there, and couldn’t do nothin’ about it if they did.”

  Charlotte Amalie on Saint Thomas was the main Danish settlement in the Virgin Islands. It h
ad been declared a free city a while back.

  “Browbury, tell me true. When the pirates boarded you, it was all dumb-show, right?”

  “Ay-yuh, a little bit of a show for the boys to tell about when we get back home. I wanted to make it look good.” He tried a wink on me. “You know.”

  “That’s taking a hell of a chance. What if one of your people had fought back?”

  He grinned, revealing yellow gums and black stubs of teeth. “That lot? Not likely. The only ones with any spunk was the niggers, and they all jumped ship and j’ined the pirates.”

  “So you met him in Charlotte Amalie and proposed to sell him your silks?”

  The grin disappeared. “I struck up an acquaintance with him, ay-yuh.”

  “An easy man to get to know, hey?”

  He brought his eyebrows together so fierce I thought he was going to wring them right off his face. “Him! He must’ve been titted on vinegar and weaned on lemons. I thought he might kill me with a look.”

  “Then why do business with him?”

  “Struck me as honest. Most chaps in Charlotte Amalie will cut your throat as soon as look at ye, but he looked like he’d at least want a reason. He stood out.”

  “But weren’t you afraid someone might do for him and make off with the whole caboodle, yours and his alike?”

  “Hell, no. Pardon me for speakin’ an oath, but even them renegadoes and villains steered clear of him. They was a-feared of him, and that was my protection.”

  He’d lost his low cunning look, as well as his bluster, and he seemed smaller without them. He didn’t look any cleaner, though.

  “Describe him.”

  “Oh, he were a beanpole. Had a phyz on him ye could use to cut cheese.” He passed his hand over his face, like he might pull it into the shape he was trying to describe. “He was all nose and chin. Wore his hat low over his brow, like he had a secret he were hiding. I mean, every man in Charlotte Amalie got a secret, but they usually don’t make no bones about ’em. Maybe he just weren’t accustomed to the trade, I dunno.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Ay-yuh, he had a scar on his la’board cheek.” He touched his face, considering. “Nay, I tell a lie—it were on the sta’board. Kinda pinkish and puckered, like it were recent but not too recent.”

  “Did he call himself Mèche?”

  He shrugged. “Could be. Somethin’ French. He spoke his English with an accent, but it were a little unwieldy on him.”

  “His English was unwieldy?”

  “Nay, mate, it were the accent he had trouble with.”

  “Did he say where he was bound?”

  He shook his head. “If he did, I wouldn’t put no stock in it anyway.”

  “I guess not.” I handed him back the brig’s papers. “It’s too bad there ain’t nothing in there to say what he took from you.”

  “Well, he didn’t just steal the stink out o’ the bilges.”

  I looked out the stern lights to hide my smile. “Molasses, then,” I said. “Black strap, fair to middling quality. Thirty tons of it, I expect.”

  “It were rum. Ay-yuh, rum.” He nodded his head wisely. “Decent stuff. Not the finest quality, perhaps, but none of that foul tafia.”

  I shook my head. “Shipping rum to New England? That’s daft. Molasses, definitely. Not so very good molasses, neither. Sulfurous, thin—about twenty-five tons, I’d say.”

  “Forty ton—good molasses. Or not bad, I should say,” he said, catching my look. “And it were took by a short, one-eyed Johnny Crappo operating outside his proper sphere—one of them half-nigger renegadoes from San Domingo gone on the account, eh?”

  “I am astonished and mortified to hear it, sir, and I’ll report it to the commodore the very moment I see him. Them French pirates is everywhere, and we’re determined to root ’em out and destroy ’em. Why, that is my very mission. Now, this pirate of yours—I don’t care if he was short or tall, and I don’t care how many eyes he had. But it would be convenient for him to be French.”

  “Ay-yuh, he were French. Most fatuously.”

  “Fatuously . . . you mean emphatically?”

  “Ay-yuh. What you said.”

  I got up to go, but then I thought of something that had been bothering me. “How many men did he have?”

  He looked at me blank, and then scowled something fierce. “Say, now that ye mention it, I dinnit see but half a dozen niggers an’ the two white men he palled around with. Sometimes he had one with him an’ sometimes the other, but never the three of ’em ashore at once. He had a one-legged nigger cook aboard, too, a squinty-eyed cuss with a temper on him, but they dinnit pay him no mind. A slave, I expect.”

  “How do you know he was a cook?”

  “Well, who else dumps tater peelin’s an’ beef bones over the side an’ threatens to whomp his shipmates over the noggin with a skillet?”

  “He spoke English?”

  “I dinnit say he did. He shook a fryin’ pan at ’em and scowled, but all’s he said for sure was, ‘Sacker blue.’”

  “‘Sacker blue’?”

  “Ay-yuh, ‘sacker blue.’ Frenchies say it all the time.”

  So did Doc, our old one-eyed and peg-legged cook in the Rattle-Snake and most recently of the Breeze, when he was trying to talk to a Frenchman—or pretending to be French.

  “Mèche’s two mates, the white ones,” I said, “what did they look like?”

  “One was a ugly squirt, an’ the other was excessively handsome.”

  “Excessively handsome?”

  “Ay-yuh. Like in a painting or something. Like a angel, maybe. He pretended to be rough-hewn and low, but he were a gentleman, no doubt of it.”

  “Did either of them talk?”

  “The handsome chap did. Spoke French.” He stopped to pick his ear while he thought. “The other fellow was near as dirty as me. Face like a rat. He grimaced an’ grunted an’ gestured . . .” He pulled his finger out and looked at it. “But now you mention it, I don’t guess he spoke one word, except in the cap’n’s ear.”

  I got up from the chair and commenced to shoving things around with my foot while he pretended he didn’t know what I was up to. I turned up an ancient beef bone here, some sticky britches there, a tin plate planted with a crop of mold, a broken jackknife, a hat with a busted crown . . . all sorts of antediluvian rubbish, but, thing was, it was in heaps instead of layers. That kind of filth takes years to accumulate, unless it’s dumped down all at once. I kicked a last greasy hat aside and exposed a hatch secured by an iron bar and padlock.

  “What’s this?”

  “Oh, just my glory hole.” He laughed weakly. “Ye know, where I’d keep my treasure, if I had any.”

  I poked the lock with the toe of my boot. “Open it.”

  “Well, now, son—”

  “You can open it quiet, or I can open it noisy.”

  “Oh—hang it.” He hauled a big iron key out of his britches pocket and undid the padlock.

  I hauled the hatch open. The compartment it covered was filled with a canvas sack, and the canvas sack was filled with something that clinked. The blame thing wouldn’t budge, though I seized it in both fists and hauled away. I slashed it open with my jackknife and reached inside. The stern lights was so grimed over that I could barely see what I’d grabbed—but I know money when I feel it. I stepped to the better light in the companionway and opened my fist.

  “Goodness me, Captain Browbury,” I said. “Look at what I found.”

  He clutched his shirtfront like he was about to tear it off, and his eyes were fixed on my hand, but he didn’t come any closer. “What is it?” he said.

  “As if you didn’t know.” I held it out so he could see. It shone even in that light, and its milled rim was rough beneath my fingertips. “You seem to have a bag full of Spanish dollars.”

  “What of it? There must be millions of ’em in circulation all over the world. The Chinese won’t take nothin’ else in trade. An’ that there dollar i
s legal tender from Peru to Penobscot.”

  It was a little larger and a little heftier in the hand than a U.S. dollar, and bore a profile of a chubby man with a large nose and an odd smirk, looking off to the right. His hair was tied at the nape with a ribbon, same as any gent, but he seemed to be wearing a laurel wreath and a Roman toga as well. Below him was the date, 1776. In a semicircle around his head ran the legend CAROLUS III DEI GRATIA.

  “Says here, ‘Charles the Third, by the grace of God,’” I said. “But what is he by the grace of God, I wonder. Captain Browbury, what do you think?”

  He worked his mouth, but he shook his head without saying anything.

  I turned the coin over. It had a quartered shield on the back bearing the castles and lions of Spain on it, supported by a pillar on either hand and with a crown above it. The legend on that side read HISPAN ET IND REX.

  “Oh, here’s the rest of it,” I said. “See there? It’s short for ‘Hispaniarum et Indiarum Rex.’ That’s Latin for ‘King of Spain and the Indies.’” I pointed at the other letters. “The M is for Mexico City, where it was minted, and the numeral eight and the letter R is for ocho reales.”

  “So it looks like a million other pieces of eight. What of it?”

  “What of it, indeed. What if I was to pull out a few handfuls at random—how many of ’em would have the same date?”

  He shrugged. “How the hoo-roar would I know?”

  “Let’s have a look, then.” I grabbed another fistful of coins. “This one on top is from seventeen seventy-six.” I flang it at him; he snatched it out of the air like a dog snapping at a fly. “And this one is . . . seventeen seventy-six. What about this one? Hey, seventeen seventy-six. See where this is going?”

  I threw the coins on the deck and admired the way they rang. Say what you will about the Dons, they know their silver. Browbury knew his silver, too, and he scooped them up quick as lightning.

  “These here coins are all twenty-four years old,” I said. “By the date on ’em, anyway. But look how they shine! Like they’re just minted. And you know why? Because they just been minted. Mèche stole some barrels of coins just like this.” I flipped a last coin in the air and caught it. “This here is the money you got in payment from him.”